How To Build A Quarterly Marketing Roadmap
Creating an ongoing quarterly marketing strategy roadmap helps you communicate marketing activities and align different departments on a unified marketing strategy. In conjunction with a product launch, the quarterly marketing plan gives you a clear overview of the marketing strategy and high-level strategic marketing initiatives your team will implement to reach larger product and business goals and objectives. Use this step-by-step guide to create your marketing roadmaps, easily.
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Xtensio’s FREE Quarterly Marketing Roadmap Template
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Your guide to building an interactive quarterly marketing roadmap to align your team
At the beginning of every new quarter, review the previous quarter, look at the wins, challenges, and opportunities to build a roadmap that enables you to easily track and measure success. The quarterly marketing roadmap aligns your marketing team’s high-level goals with the work that needs to be done to reach them.
The marketing strategy template will help your team:
- Create a living roadmap to communicate marketing activities and align different departments on a unified marketing strategy.
- Clearly define areas of focus for short and long-term marketing initiatives.
- Manage and align stakeholder expectations and responsibilities.
This tool is intended to help your marketing, sales, and product teams align goals with the work that needs to be done to reach them.
1. Set up your header and outline your quarterly goals
Include a header with your company logo, name, the date the roadmap was created to make it easy to scan the basics.
One of the main objectives of creating marketing roadmaps is to communicate how marketing impacts your high-level goals and align everyone in your company so you can work towards a unified goal. In turn, this gives each stakeholder a greater sense of purpose and encourages increased efficiency.
Define quantifiable SMART goals that align your marketing efforts with high-level company goals. If the business goal is to achieve $8M revenue this year, the marketing roadmap should outline quarterly content and marketing goals that help bring enough customers. For example:
- Increase website sessions by 0.35%
- Increase the monthly new marketing qualified leads (MQLs) by 15%
- Increase blog subscribers by 5%
2. Breakdown content marketing goals and tasks
Once you set SMART goals for your marketing strategy, you can break them down even further by assigning tasks and channel-specific goals. This is where you will get into the main content of your roadmap. You can now identify milestones that will impact your marketing goals. Make sure you assign ownership and due dates to each task so nothing falls through the cracks.
Start with content marketing tasks, such as:
- Research target audience
- Create content strategy
- Blog launch
- Newsletter launch
QUICK TIP: The task list module allows you to update the status of each item so your whole team can maintain visibility into what’s in rogress, what’s next and what’s completed. Change statuses as you go and share the link to keep both your marketing team and management always on the same page.
3. Define digital marketing inputs
If your marketing goal for this quarter is to increase website sessions by 0.25%, break it down even further and set specific goals for your various types of site pages like your product pages, blog, and homepage. Create roadmap items you’ll need to reach each goal.
For example:
- Keyword research
- Setup dashboard & define KPIs
- Ad trials: FB, Twitter, Instagram
4. Identify social media inputs
How will your social media efforts align with your marketing goals? What work needs to get done?
- Create social media calendar
- Build social repository
- Define best posting frequency and time
5. Don’t forget to build your brand
Long-term goals require nurturing leads and building strong customer relationships. Remember to keep your brand identity in mind when creating your roadmap. What brand-building efforts will you take on this quarter?
- Build customer-specific landing pages
- Update style guide
- Create targeted one-pagers for the sales team
6. Outline Events & PR tasks this quarter
Are you planning any special events? What press releases are you planning to launch this quareter? Detail tasks, due dates and ownership for each item.
- Update press kit with PR from Q2 product launch
- Host networking conference
- Pitch webinar ideas to management
7. Detail administration tasks
Don’t forget the housekeeping items. What tasks does your marketing management team need to tackle this quarter to make sure the team is on-track for reaching the high-level company goals?
- Build Q3 marketing budget report
- HIRE: Digital Marketing Manager
- HIRE: Content Creator
Share your marketing roadmap as a link, evaluate and update regularly
The quarterly marketing roadmap is interactive and meant to be updated as tasks and input items move through your marketing team’s workflows. Loop in members of your marketing team to update statuses, add tasks and latest updates to the living roadmap. You can share the public link to your folio to share it as a responsive webpage (and add password protection), export a PDF and post it on your bulletin board. The quarterly marketing roadmap template is adaptable just like other Xtensio tools, it can and should be repurposed, revisited, and revised regularly.
